Braxton Brewington, Press Secretary of the Debt Collective explains what we know about President Biden’s heavily redacted and unreleased student debt memo obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. He breaks down the Debt Collective’s position on the President’s legal authority to cancel student debt.

Related Articles & Link:

Transcript –

Nikki Nolan: Welcome to the podcast! It is so good to have you here. I brought you on to this mini-episode to tell me about this memo to Biden. And so tell me a little bit about the memo to Biden from the Department of Education.

Braxton Brewington: Yeah. So how we’ve seen this play out is that on April 1st the White House Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, did an interview with Politico and a reporter asked him about the timeline on student debt cancellation. And that is when it was sort of first known to the public, by Ron Klain just saying that President Biden had asked the Department of Education for a memo, outlining his authority on student debt cancellation. Whether he has the authority, whether he doesn’t, all of the things that go into legal matters. And so we’d been waiting for this very mysterious memo since April 1st. We know that as early as February, the White House Press Secretary tweeted that the administration was reviewing this authority. We didn’t have many other details other than that.

But April 1st is when we got the confirmation that there was an ask for a memo. And we have been asking for this memo for months. I mean, since April Ron Klain said it would be done in a few weeks. So we were thinking, oh, by May, by June, and here we are in November. So we’ve been waiting for this memo and at a certain point, it just became so long that we decided we’ll just request it through the Freedom of Information Act and see if we can get any type of information on it. And that’s what we did. We learned that the memo existed before April, but the word “draft” was removed from it in April. So that’s when it became final at least was no longer a working attorney memo that it was before. It was completely redacted.

So we don’t know what it says, but we did get a slew of emails that we’ve been able to pontificate about what it could possibly mean. There is a title that is titled something like President Biden’s broad-based authority for student debt cancellation, which really implies that he has the authority. And we think that the existence of the memo confirms that there is authority. Then, the memo itself shifts to another title where they specifically referenced heroes or the authority under the Heroes Act, which gets into a little bit of the legal specifics, but basically what we know is that the memo has existed and it has existed for several months.

And, that the Biden administration still to date has not said anything about the existence of the memo, whether they will take extra action on student debt cancellation. Again, we also don’t know what the memo says, other than a small redacted paragraph, which is a bit of legal jargon. So that’s where we are.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. So you put it in the Freedom of Information Act. You got back this memo. What are some of the things that have happened since you did get that memo? What have you all been doing?

Braxton Brewington: Yeah. So, once we got the information, we sent it to lawyers with the Debt Collective to chat about what we’ve thought this means. Again, it’s 99% redacted, so it’s really difficult to tell. We do know that it doesn’t seem based off of the title and one small paragraph, which is very much not the entire memo- it does seem like there’s a chance they are not citing compromise and settlement as the authority to cancel student debt. That would be a bit concerning I think since we believe compromise and settlement is the authority under the Higher Education Act in which we’ve always believed that the Biden Administration can cancel student debt and in a broad, sweeping way.

We are not going to be devastated if the Biden Administration canceled student debt through some different legal authority, this is just one legal authority that we sort of found in obscurity years ago. But since then we’ve had brief conversations about what we think it means. And then we released it. We told the world, but this is what we know so far. And we would have obviously preferred for the Biden Administration to give their own analysis on what they believe because that’s what we’re waiting for. And so we released it with, I think in a way really highlights how long this administration has been stalling in student debt cancellation that in the time that we’ve been waiting on the memo, we’ve been able to file a foyer for it and get documents for it. And then release it and all of this time they could have just told us what the memo itself said. So that’s sort of where we are.

Nikki Nolan: What does compromise and settlement mean?

Braxton Brewington: Yes, compromise and settlement. That is the authority that the Debt Collective found years ago, and Senator Warren has championed in recent years and what she cited in her push to the Biden Administration to cancel, at least $50,000 per borrower. So compromise and settlement is this sort of obscure line in the Higher Education Act that says the Department of Education can compromise loans, which means they could modify it in a way. And one of those ways is eliminating the loan, which, or cancel or discharge, whatever we’re doing, we use to eliminate the loan. So we’ve been pushing for the Biden Administration to use compromise and settlement authority for a few years now. But what we know is that there are multiple ways, legally quote, unquote, to cancel student debt.

So, borrower defense to repayment is another method that this administration has been using to eliminate debt for individuals who have been maybe taken advantage of or attended predatory for-profit colleges. The Heroes Act it seems it’s something the Biden administration might be referencing in terms of what they believe to be legal authority to cancel student debt.

There might be other authorities out there. And again, we believe the law can be tweaked for political purposes. And so, again, we’re not sold on one particular authority being used to cancel student debt, but we do believe compromise and settlement is that authority.

​​So we’ve actually been kind of joking at the Debt Collective, questioning whether in a joking way, questioning whether the Biden Administration actually has the legal authority to pardon a turkey. And while that is slightly comical, I think it actually really highlights the absurdity of waiting on this memo, outlining Biden’s authority to cancel student debt.

We know that previous administrations have pardoned a turkey, and so we don’t question whether Biden can do it today. The same really goes for canceling student debt, right? The lawyers at the Debt Collective are confident, as is the legal staff that works with Schumer and Warren steadfast in their understanding of the law; those things are true. At the same time, we know that President Obama, President Trump, and President Biden have all used some type of legal authority to cancel student debt, whether that’s waiving interest, waiving part of the loan, or discharging a loan altogether. And so, waiting on this memo was really what we call a politics of distraction.

We don’t actually need a memo to tell us that Biden has the authority to cancel student debt, while he is currently canceling some people’s student debt. We’re really just sort of playing on the White House’s turf here. They claim that they need a memo. There’s not much we can do to trump the White House is telling them that they don’t need this memo if they say that they need it. We’re calling the Biden Administration out for taking too long to draft this memo or having drafted the memo and not releasing it to the public. We’re calling all of the things out. We’re demanding that the memo be released so that we know what it says.

We’re assuming that it says that Biden can cancel student debt with his broad sweeping authority. And so that we can move on, demanding cancellation, but all in all, we really do not need this memo at all because it’s going to tell us something that we all know.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, I’m going to ask you a question and it’s totally okay if you don’t have the answer. I just, in a previous episode, somebody answered it and I don’t want to put you on the spot, but, why are we going after Biden for executive order cancellation as opposed to going through Congress?

Braxton Brewington: Yeah. So this is something that I think the Debt Collective and Chuck Schumer really agree on. Congress is extremely divided. It is extremely partisan. And we are not going to be able to get full student debt cancellation through Congress in the next year until we have more progressive members of Congress.

And so, not only is it difficult to get that legislation through, but we shouldn’t have to push for legislation if President Biden can do this on his own. So for example, early in the administration, I think day one, or maybe day two, Joe Biden signed an executive order, reinstating that the United States would be in the Paris Climate Accord. Right? That was a really simple executive action that he took. It wouldn’t really make a lot of sense for Joe Biden to say, I need Congress to pass a bill, putting us back in the Paris Climate Accord, and then I’ll sign it, when he could just sort of do it on his own. And so we see student debt cancellation similar to other executive authorities.

For example, $15 minimum wage for federal contractors or the legalization of marijuana, all of these things that he can do through executive action. There’s not really much of an incentive to push for Congress to pass that because what we know is that it would just be simpler to find where to do it.

He wouldn’t have to go through Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, the reconciliation process, and our Congress was just way too divided. I don’t even want to guess what type of whittled-down student debt cancellation bill would even get through this Congress that can’t even pass some of the most basic necessities.

Nikki Nolan: That makes a lot of sense. We had Alan Collinge on the show and he also, what he alluded to was that the reason we can’t go through Congress is that the pay as you go is part of Congress, so we would actually have to pay for the debt to be eliminated if it did go through Congress. So through executive order, we wouldn’t have to come up with some kind of budgetary thing to actually go through it, but I don’t know. That’s what he said. And it was that piece of information that made my mind go, okay, this explains exactly why we need to do it through executive order. I agree, I’m in full agreement, we have to go to an executive order.

I want to switch topics a little bit. What has been the impact of student debt on your life?

Braxton Brewington: Yeah, great question. I have, remaining $45,000, around that area worth of student loans I quote-unquote, owe to the Department of Education. I worked really, really hard during college to pay down as much as I could. I worked 50, 60, 70 plus hours a week, oftentimes through multiple jobs to come out with as little amount of debt as possible.

But, the reality is you just simply can’t work your way through, even though an entire year, let alone summer. I think generations past could do where they would just work for a summer and be able to pay for the cost of college. So, my story isn’t, I don’t think too much different than a lot of folks in my situation.

I went to North Carolina A&T State University, which is an HBCU in North Carolina. 90% of students who go to HBCUs have to borrow federal dollars. So I am no statistical anomaly. I’m very much the exact- What do you want to call it?

Nikki Nolan: Poster child.

Braxton Brewington: Yeah, that’s it, poster child. A black student that goes to college, goes to an HBCU and has to, essentially use federal dollars, use loans to pay for their college because of not having that generational wealth because it was stripped, generations past. And not having that grandmother to call on to just give me $60,000 that she’s been saving up.

Oftentimes, that type of cash flow ends up going backward, right? Children are paying for their parents’ things and parents are paying for grandparents’ things. And so, not only do I have tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt but so does my family; my immediate family, mom, dad, two siblings.

We are a household of student debtors. We all have student debt and so, we are really, I think a common story in the United States right now of generations of people, especially black Americans, and the way we’re told to get ahead is through education. Taking out loans in the hopes that we’ll get such a high-paying job after college, and we’ll be able to pay this debt off in no time.

But the truth is with the rising cost of tuition, usurious interest rates and being underpaid and discrimination in the workplace leading to lower pay for certain demographics, it just doesn’t work out the way that you can simply pay off that debt in a simple amount of time. So that’s kind of my story of my debt.

I went to school for journalism and political science. And I’m very much doing the work that I went to school for. And I believe I was supposed to start paying in March of 2020. That was, I graduated in December of 2018 and I deferred for a while, as long as I could, until they told Navient just, I mean, could not call me every 30 minutes it seemed, to start payments.

And so I was supposed to start in March, but there was a pandemic. There was a pause on student loans. And so today I actually haven’t paid a dime on my student loans. I was supposed to start making $207 payments a month. I’m not sure how long that was going to last or how long that was projected to last, but that was sort of my situation.

So I guess in February if payments were just turned back on that could be an option, but I will not be paying. I think there are a lot of safe ways to get to $0 a month or extremely low payments a month, which is basically incentivized by the government. I went back and looked at a couple of emails and it said “Braxton, you can pay as low as $25 a month on your student loans”. And I’m “what?”, this is just proof that this isn’t really going to get anywhere. So that’s my situation and where I am and where my household is.

Nikki Nolan: We’re going to totally get into that. Hopefully, you’ll be back on the show. We can do a full episode and learn more about the robust person that you are. I don’t know what word I just used there, robust. I’m what is the word I’m looking for?

Braxton Brewington: I love that word.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. Okay. so we’re coming to the end, this is just a mini-episode. Is there anything that I didn’t ask you about that you want to talk about?

Braxton Brewington: The other thing I will mention is that it seems the Biden Administration wants to do everything in their power to not have to cancel student debt or extend the payment pause. And I just think it’s important to emphasize this reporting that came out a few months ago where the White House said they were wary about extending the pause past September because remember the pause went through September 30th. They were wary about extending the pause through September because they thought it would hamper their economic messaging. Which would sort of emphasize that if the pause were extended, that must mean the pandemic is still going on, which means people are still struggling and we don’t want to give that opinion off or to give that facade that things are still struggling, under COVID-19. And so there was a lot of pushback and back and forth between actually the Department of Education officials in the White House.

Obviously, that pause ended up being extended until January 31st. But I would imagine that that is still part of the holdup as to why we are possibly looking at payments being turned back on, or not having thorough conversations about cancellation right now because the White House really fundamentally is confused in my belief about what good economic messaging is. And so really it actually could work in their favor to say, we really want to finish out with economic recovery and one of the ways to get there is to cancel student debt. Which would narrow the racial wealth gap, add millions of jobs, blue star annual GDP by hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And look, now we are really making a recovery and improving people’s lives. So, maybe someone just needs to tap Biden on the shoulder and really explain to him how the economic recovery message works. But this is really an option for them to cancel student debt and to brag about it. And so I’d go around him, boast about it and say, this is something we did for people.

But, that’s just kind of where we are. And I think a lot of the holdup as to why we haven’t gotten cancellation or why we haven’t extended the moratorium past January though, we know that there’s very much still a pandemic.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, there’s very, we are very much still in the pandemic.

Braxton Brewington: Yeah.

Nikki Nolan: How might people find out about this work that the Debt Collective has been doing? And is there anything else that you want to promote?

Braxton Brewington: Sure people should go to debtcollective.org. There they will see some of our recent updates and they could join the Debtors Union and they could also join the forum where there are lots of conversations ongoing about student loan debt and other debt types that are extremely pervasive right now in our economy.

We’re also on social media, of course, @strikedebt on Twitter and @debtcollective on Instagram and Facebook. And so people can find this there. I think we have a tiktok called the Debt Collective as well. So folks want to check out some tiktok they can go there too.

Nikki Nolan: Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. This was lovely talking to you.

Braxton Brewington: Thank you so much for having me.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe

Listen on